


To The Same Degree

by AllTheDances



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Blood and Violence, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Death, Fix-It, Immortality, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Magic Shit, Red Gods and Dad Bods, Reincarnation, Religious Shit, SanSan Secret Santa, Seriously. WTF Happened In That Room, Still Hate Writing, This Detail Kinda Stood Out, WaltzingTheFaePaths
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 21:08:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19980526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllTheDances/pseuds/AllTheDances
Summary: A gift for fairyofthefriz/WaltzingTheFaePaths . Working from their prompt: "Come back to me".





	To The Same Degree

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WaltzingTheFaePaths](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WaltzingTheFaePaths/gifts).



> This is unbeta'd. I have tagged as appropriately as I could think of; however, if it's missing tags, please let me know. 
> 
> Also, full disclosure, I watched 95% of the final season (all of the seasons, actually) via tumblr posts. There could be some straight up errors and/or weird continuity. If you find any, I apologize.
> 
> Just hope you dig it fairyofthefriz/WaltzingTheFaePaths :)

Falling was the easy part - as much as shoving a giant, undead brother/creature through a castle wall to initiate said descent would allow to be easy - the task of death was left to gravity. 

And dragon’s fire.

And jagged rubble.

It was amongst the fire and atop the rubble that Sandor accepted his fate. As the inhuman thing used to break his fall squelched mostly apart upon impact yet kept twitching in effort to fight, prompting renewed pummeling; as whatever malicious ooze that sloshed around in its veins caught light like fat-wood the moment they landed amongst the blaze...

His fury burned bright, not to be dimmed by the brilliant, terrible flames which surrounded him, and he knew, as he always suspected - the invite having been a standing one and all - Sandor knew he had accompanied his bastard brother into Hell. One of them. All of them. It didn’t matter the details because the broader terms made sense, he thought, while one more strike caved in the skull of the thing that had been his brother, that the curse of his life would damn him in death, as well.

Hunched over a putrid carcass, Sandor Clegane hung his head in submission to The Stranger.

::::::::::::::::

While waiting for death the living usually settle into a state of either fear or complacency. Yet there he sat, not burning, biding his time for whatever was to come next.

Sandor’s monster had charred in places beneath him, the ash starting to swirl around him, get into his eyes and mouth. The rocks burned. Some even cracking and splitting from the heat. The air itself would blister a voice to silence.

“ _Come back to me_ …”

Not _that_ voice.

Sandor knew fear the moment he heard her.

His lungs pulled in breath, his flesh remained intact. All but consumed in destruction and a perpetual burn of dragon fire, the rush of it like the sound of gales off the sea, and he sat there within it all as though he were doing no more than appreciating a particularly sunny day. If he was dead and he heard her it meant she was dead too, and the truth of that utter disappointment turned his gut to lead. 

It was as though the sound of her call and the acknowledgement of her fate had removed ash and debris from his mind, cleared the wreckage, and made room for the feelings she kindled that night. That night, the last night, a celebration. She had sat down, bold as you like, and smiled at him. Not in mocking, but in something else, but he had been too driven to be moving in the opposite direction that he’d merely humored it.

“ _Come back to me_ …”

Fear came back and he moved slowly from the top of his soot-laden perch, picking his way and the rocks to climb on carefully as he went. Every step and his folly continued to unfold. There had been no need of him in this place; the dragons had their way after all. As he found a tidy-though-scorched spot at the base of the tower from which he took his plummet, Sandor Clegane once more hung his head, this time weighted from the shame of regret.

His head hurt inside as the fog continued to lift. His deed done, mighty vanquishment so hollow now, the world he left behind came barreling in. Like illustrations in the books that used to make him happy, the images of her and her castle and her winter and her dead all punched into place, hammer to nail, in violent precision.

He knew she knew he knew she wanted him to stay in the North.

He knew she knew he knew she wanted him, full stop.

What a fool. He felt it now, regret turning sour in his belly, becoming something else. Something that made him feel the desire from her actions that night, and a vicious kind of agitation at the notion he was only just now allowed to feel them. 

While waiting for death, rarely do the living simmer into a rage.

Even rarer is that they’re unsuited for demise in the first place.

::::::::::::::::

He heard the steps from deep in the flames and panicked momentarily at the thought of Sansa Stark walking through a furnace to haunt him. Though, as the confident thump of boot to ground grew close, Sandor could appreciate the stepping cadence of someone decidedly not Sansa Stark. 

_The Stranger._

Sandor would not fear his destiny.

He looked to the thing approaching.

Hell. He was most certainly in the deepest of them. Out of the swirling ash and stinging licks of flame - a knot of hair atop his head and all - walked a smiling priest. _The_ smiling priest. Beric’s. That was it, there would be no redemption in the face of bloody gods, not for the likes of him. Sandor had died and would forever be accompanied by demon fire and now _this_ fool, who was sauntering closer.

 _Thoros_.

_R'hllor._

R'hllor, as a God, was categorically unremarkable. However, when he spoke, there was no doubt as to whether the annoying man Sandor knew in life was now a deity. For it seemed the fire itself turned to him and talked, a voice from all directions, the clarity matching the sure burn of the flames around them.

“Clegane,” was the greeting, accompanied by a tiny nod of the head, and Sandor hated even now how this man-god could make the beckon of his name sound like a smile.

Sandor wore a look of annoyance, head tilting a little to the right, as he squinted back to the body standing what felt like not even a hands’ width away. “Priest,” he scoffed.

“You’re not dead, Clegane.”

“You are.”

Thoros smiled at the large man who was making a good attempt at standing. “This is true,” he agreed in his all-around voice, “but _you_ are not.”

He was right, looking down to his hands - as rough and scarred as they had been any day before, skin intact. Thoros was right and Sandor hated the priest all the more in that moment because of it. Sandor did not burn, he was engulfed in it all and felt no different than he did prior to mounting the tower’s steps...

Aversion. Sandor was missing the almost predictable dread that had lived inside him since he was a boy. Consumed by fire, standing in it, speaking around it, and there was no longer a panic in place for it. 

When his look slid from confusion to concern, the god of the two of them had the good grace to become a distraction. Clearing his throat in a way that made the fire bend low, Thoros drew Sandor’s attention. 

“Do you remember what she did to you?” 

The question was asked so mildly, soft like a hush, Sandor felt that the thing in his company was trying to gentle a blow, of sorts. So, when he closed his eyes, picturing Sansa with her smile and… and a new piece… the touch of her fingers, a small huff rattled out at the sense of her thumb scoring a wonderful line across the back of his hand. The moment he opened his eyes again, he knew his thoughts weren't entirely his own, nor were they correct. The priest stood, too close, smiling at him like some demented mage.

"Not her," Thoros corrected, tactfully.

There weren't many _hers_ in his acquaintance; Sandor's mind flipped to the younger one, the sister, but the Priest looked at him with a lick of pity and tiny shake of his head. Like a puzzle swallowing a missing piece, the her in question had him nearly doubled over to retch, and he had no idea as to why. Try as he might to piece it together, try as he might to remember his time in that room with the Red Witch, his recollection was the same as it had been the night of the battle: black in that one particular spot. He’d never dwelled on those moments, there was no need, his want for revenge was all consuming. 

“She gave you a gift,” Thoros said.

Sandor, flicking his eyes around the scorched landscape of heat and death and destruction, said, quite frankly, “She can have it back.”

“ _Come back to me…_ ”

At the next smile from Beric's priest Sandor knew himself to be a joke. A clod. This was all a jape and he barely withheld his fury. Instead he shouldered past the God before making to leave… to anywhere. Anywhere lacking the company of that singular being. What he didn't expect was the slight man to grasp his bicep and hold him firm. Even with a hefty shake of his arm, the man's hand remained tethered while the rest of him looked not even bothered.

Sandor glared with eyes conveying the violence that was coming to the surface.

Thoros wore a look again in a way akin to pity.

There wasn’t much time to dwell on it, a heartbeat perhaps, before Sandor’s entire body registered agony. In a blink of time he felt every wound and trauma he’d encouraged since stepping back into King’s Landing. Just as he felt his broken legs give and his bowels loosen he was once again hale, standing strong ...and held in place.

“What am I,” he hissed. He’d seen more death than he was want to speak of, most of which, recently, had been trying to kill him right back. He wasn’t grey and rot, he lived amongst the dragon fire, and his mind flitted back to an image of the red priestess trotting off into the dawn only to dissolve. 

What had happened in that room with the Red Witch during the Battle of Winterfell was a lost memory. He recalled Beric… in the passageway. He was cognizant that they went into the ante chamber - himself, the girl, and the priestess. Thoughts were getting muzzy. He remembered Arya fucking off, then, after all was said and done, that he and the red priestess stumbled out of that same gods-damned room slightly burnt and overly bloody. 

“S-She did something…” Sandor uttered, not quite focused on the words as he tried to pry open his recollection.

“She sacrificed herself for your strength, Clegane. She had been assured you would make the right choice.” 

“ _Come back to me…_ ”

Sandor glared at the priest again, but this time the only fire to be found was in the stuff raging and feeding on the environment about them. “I’ll not bring this - whatever you call it - to be a burden on anyone else. End me here.”

It was the priest’s turn to tilt head in question and, without fail, smile once again. This time knowingly.

“You won’t go to her?” Thoros asked.

The statement barely finished when Sandor had the breath kicked from him, from the inside. His vision captured flits of Sansa, he could smell snow and that dry-dust smell of bitter cold, and it was all a callback to Winterfell, he knew. Nothing of the southern castle he had so selfishly needed to die in. The images pushed at him, burrowed under his ribs and tugged like a string caught behind the flesh.

Sandor gulped, near-wheezed, “She has no need of saving, I can promise you that.”

“You can hear her as clearly as I can,” Thoros chuckled. “She needs _you_.” And although he had completed the puzzle openly, Thoros understood Clegane sometimes needed to hear his own hesitations put to voice. It made them less frightening that way - in what a queer angle to regard the giant warrior he considered a friend.

“I’ll not take this burden-”

“Your mind is not faulty, Dog, do not pretend to be stupid for my benefit.” But sometimes giant warriors were thick-headed children and Sandor blinked simply at the man as an offer of proof. “She speaks to you and you hear her. This is not a burden, but a _gift_.”

“ _Come back to me…_ ”

The way Sandor’s eyes fluttered and his large chest rose at the ethereal chant was enough to tell the god his warrior was at a start. A new start. Shaky at first, but…

“She stands, forged of the hottest flames and tempered in the coldest of earth,” Thoros offered kindly as he walked away, allowing fire to creep into his footfalls. “There is nothing you can do unwillingly that will break her.” 

And he was gone.

The Fool-God was gone and Sandor himself began navigating out of what remained of the fire, the castle, and the population, and besides some scrapes and smudges of soot about his person there wasn’t a mark on him, not really. The tug under the skin and meat of his upper chest was still persistent, but he found it bearable now that he was moving.

The corpse of his brother continued to cook and Sandor Clegane walked with tunneled vision.

“ _Come back to me…_ ”

And a purpose.

North.

To come back.


End file.
